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Ok, hopefully somebody had delt with this in the past and can lend some advice. We are in an arena that is filled with slime (credit repair). I made the decision to enter this arena after a few years of retirement for a few reasons.a) Massive Market - Nearly 85% of Americans have bad credit.b) The competitors are all slime (literally)- I saw this as an opportunity to bring to the ...

Personally, from a business standpoint I think Google will move to the big brands and here's why:

Google has two objectives

1: Make Money

2: Show Relevant Results

Well, if a search for "Puma" returned Zappos, Amazon, Puma etc nobody could argue that those weren't relevant results. This would also force all the millions of small business owners and affiliates to be stuck with PPC. Problem solved on all fronts.Can't say I'd benefit from that - but if I was G, I'd certainly be considering it as a logical option

Ok I'm a little stumped. We had to move our blog and blow out our content (dont ask) and start completely fresh.We set up a 301 to the new blog which basically went something like this. www.oursite.com/blog to http://blog.oursite.com

So we 301 /blog/ to new blog address and it works if you go to the old blog URL. However, google is still showing a 404 for all the hundreds of pages that were on the old blog.

How do we get Google to understand anything in that entire folder is gone?Thank you in advance.

I managed mutual funds for some very large investment firms a few years before, during and after the dot.com bust.

You touched on some good points. Unfortunately, you’ve left out a couple very important points as well.

Do I believe there is going to be another bust? Certainly and I think its going to be much worse then 2000, or at least I think the recovery time will take longer.

You can make an argument for it two ways

1.The most obvious is trends cycle: From Fashion and music, to [insert your favorite trend here]. too tired to think of examples

2. The more realistic reason is the Real Driving force behind the markets - the real money. VC’s don’t drive markets with their petty little 5 million dollar investments. The first cycle of real money just started retiring – baby boomers.

The first big wave of baby boomers have been in their spending years since 1999(ish). Buying their houses, making their last big round of internet investments, BMW’s, 401K’s. ramping up for their retirement years.

Now they've officlally started retiring, that’s a boat load of money that will taper off now because they are older, more conservative and money will be going to safer things like Rand mentioned.

They will be taking their money from names like Google, Ebay & Starbucks and putting it names like Proctor & Gamble and Caterpillar

If you really want to scare yourselves read “The Great Boom Ahead” by Harry S. Dent. Has some pretty undeniable, hard to argue with facts that point to 2008 as the beginning of some big changes.

I don’t know if this subject has been put to rest yet based on the date of the posts. If not I would like to lend some insight.

I used to help bring companies public by raising capital, arranging all the filings etc. I also brought my own company public so I feel I can give some first hand experience of what you might expect.

If you love what you do, keep your baby! If you take on outside funding or go public, I would be surprised If you ever have the time to write another post.

Here’s a brief look into what you could expect to be doing 18 hours a day.

You’ve done a fantastic job with SEOmoz, but in terms of “big finance” you’re relatively small. Therefore, your offers will come from sharks who will be drooling over a chance to crush you, your company and make a quick buck. They don’t care about your company, its about money.

Every post you make will now have to be reviewed by Lawyers first. Why? Because if you mention clients, profits or ideas - they could all constitute projections, or anything else a greedy person could use against you, which are synonymous with potential frivolous lawsuits.

You’ll be under constant pressure to develop new products. If they are not released “regular” enough, the complaints will start coming in. If you release them too fast, they are not up to your standards.

It was always my dream to bring a company public and I finally did. It took away everything that made me proud. It wasn’t fun, there was no time to enjoy it and was the worst thing I ever did.

Sure, it is right for some people, but I promise you it isn’t about doing what you love anymore. It will be about putting out fires and pleasing greedy people and regulators.

Let me give you a couple small examples;

In our business plan we had a project slated for October. It was released August, we finished up quicker then anticipated.

A month later the S.E.C. sent me packets that took me months to clear up because they wanted to make sure nothing fishy was going on.

(bring on the lawyers and accountants to fix the problem)

I bought a pack of Cigarettes and water at a 7-11 once. I didn’t have any cash on me so I used a company credit card ($5.50). Well, I potentially just pierced our corporate vale and it cost me $7,000.00 in accounting fees to rectify and countless hours adjusting books.

Conversations, friendly posts, seminars are no longer just informative bits of information by you. They are words that can be held against you as soon as a shareholder decides he isn’t making enough money.

In short, if you want to go outside, be aware it’s no longer your company and it’s no longer fun. It pays, but its like those movies you see of rich people who have completely miserable lives.

Great idea and it kind of touches on the edge of a subject we have been banging our heads against the wall over.
We own a credit repair company (one of the few actual legitimate ones) and we’ve recently started a blog. Coming up with topics seems near impossible for us. There are 4 major laws that encompass this industry and they have been regurgitated millions of times via article hubs.
Being new to blogging, coming up with a new slant - or area of constant conversation is proving to be a real problem for us.
The thought has crossed our mind to be completely off topic from our core specialty, but one that is targeted for our demographics.
E.g. core audience is early 30’s, 30K per year household income.
Any thoughts or advice?
Thank you.